4.21.2008

one of the best cover designs i have come across this month. margaret mcmillan, uses and abuses of history [this is just about the cover. i do not know anything about the author or this particular book.]

As long as ads are aimed at children, as long as luxury SUVs are presented as necessary, as long as the difference between "want" and "need" is blurred on purpose, I'll think of advertising as immoral. -- fraxas [on advertising]

People who brandish naturalistic principles at us are usually up to mischief. -- peter medawar [the future of man]

Philosophically, I believe the designer's goal involves making decisions for the user. If the decisions are good, it's a good design and the user is content. I do not believe it's the designer's goal to defer everything to the user. As a bonus, making decisions early tends to simplify the design. -- rob pike [9fans mailing list]

faith is the invisible means of support for a belief when reasons fall out from under it. -- austin dacey

unfortunately, consulting entrails has never been a reliable guide to truth, even when those entrails are your own. -- austin dacey [the secular conscience]

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. -- Microsoft .NET Framework [another amusing and informative manifestation of enterprise-level public debugging infrastructure]

4.18.2008

We could just assume all trust fund babies are sipping latte at Starbucks and refer to figure 1, but that wouldn't serve the interests of science. Instead, let's assume that trust fund babies have one thing in common, money, and look at how wealth stacks against voting habits.

clearly i do not need just a notebook; i need a strange hybrid. so far, i like circus ponies notebook as a comfortable compromise, though its lack of direct blogging support is forcing me to look for other tools. [my blog is just one of my notebooks, structured slightly better for public display.] i initially wrote this entry as a test from macjournal. [the result did not display correctly, alas; it was fixed using appzapper...]

[if any readers of this blog have some suggestions, other than write the app yourself, i would appreciate them]

[update: i have circus ponies notebook, and voodoopad pro now. they are both reasonable tools, with some nice ideas. on the other hand, neither tool impresses me all that much.]

4.08.2008

I could make a very compelling argument that Open XML has done more to revive the reputation of international standards than any other standard before it.

i doubt such an argument can be made anywhere except in warm fantasies of those oblivious to decades of international standards work. a reasonable reading of the events, arguments and objections around this particular "standard" suggests iso's reputation, such as it was since the heady days of iso/osi, is worse off than before; there has been significant complaints that microsoft, consistent with its history of monopolistic aggressiveness, has abused the standards fasttrack process to push out a specification that it can manipulate to compete against a well-specified, open iso standard it does not like. [canada, i am proud to say, voted against this faux-standard precisely because of this]

Here Comes Everybody [hmm, i know some people called this a masterpiece, but i reserve that word for very, very special books. my initial impression is that this is a good solid piece of work, but not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination.]

The Age of American Unreason [robert fulford of national post called her a "demi intellectual" and wrote a lazy, lip-smacking critique of sorts, as befitting his paper: "To satisfy Jacoby, it's not enough to exhibit intelligence. It's necessary also to use that intelligence properly, to develop views closely resembling hers." first part of the sentence is priceless, never mind its degeneration into a slur afterwards.]